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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29324745">Hand Me My Shovel, I'm Going In!</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomanydice/pseuds/toomanydice'>toomanydice</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Will Wood Inspired Fear Domains [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Content warnings can be found in the notes at the beginning, Gen, Original fear domain, The Beholding Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), The Spiral Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), Will Wood - Freeform, Will Wood and the Tapeworms</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 10:29:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,919</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29324745</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomanydice/pseuds/toomanydice</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“This is not enough! / This is not enough to prove it yet! / No, I need to hit the bottom / This is not enough! / This is not enough to prove it yet! / No, I need to hit the bottom / Gotta get to the bottom of this / Gotta get to the bottom of this / Gotta get to the bottom of this / Take you with me”</p><p>Case ########: An examination of investigative journalism</p><p>An original fear domain inspired by “Hand Me My Shovel, I’m Going In!” by Will Wood and the Tapeworms</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Will Wood Inspired Fear Domains [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2138778</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Hand Me My Shovel, I'm Going In!</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Content Warnings: Obsession, mental spiraling, anxiety, addiction implied (alcohol), blood, injury, self inflicted injury</p><p>Hello hello, this is my second piece in a series of season-5-style fear domains inspired by Will Wood songs. As with the first domain, knowing the song is not necessary for understanding this story, but I do recommend listening to it first to understand the inspiration, and because it's feral and I love it. </p><p>Hope you like it, stream Will Wood!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>This time she was going to get it right. She had to.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Harriett stared at the four blank walls that made up her office and then at her desk in the corner before deciding to push it to the center of the floor so it wouldn’t get in the way of her work. She took a deep breath before sitting down and began to pull open all the drawers and remove large stacks of files, piling them up in front of her. There was a story here, she knew it, she just needed to see it all laid out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She grabbed a folder off the nearest stack and began flipping through it, her eyes scanning once again over the documents riddled with notes handwritten in all different colors from her previous rounds of investigation and additional analysis. She selected a purple pen this time and began to annotate all the files once again, new details jumping out at her. She shook her head in mild disbelief as she worked. How had she been so blind? No wonder she had never been able to piece it together before, she had missed so many obvious critical points. She would have everything she needed now. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once the violet ink had bled its way through the whole file, she snatched up her box of pushpins and made her way to the wall directly in front of her and started securing the papers to its surface. A story like this wasn’t meant to live in a desk or a box, tucked away somewhere in the dark, no, no it had to be put on full display so that everyone could see it. They’d see it, she’d make them see it the way she did. She took a step back and with a nod of satisfaction headed back to her seat and grabbed the next file.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This was her chance to redeem herself, to work her way back up through the ranks of </span>
  <em>
    <span>The Citizen Observer</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Harriett’s boss, Mr. Dewey, had stopped trusting her with the more high profile articles weeks ago. Or was it months now? She felt her face flush and she remembered her stash of empty bottles, still burning a hole in her bottom drawer. “Unstable” he’d called her. She was fine, why did nobody ever believe her that she was fine? She shook her head, putting him out of her mind. She didn’t need his fake concern or pity. She had work to do.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She diligently made her way through all of her documents, all of her research, until they were gone and she was able to look around and see her office neatly wallpapered with what was certain to be the story that would make her career. She took her ball of bright crimson string and began to meticulously wrap it from pushpin to pushpin, drawing connections to related points to ensure everything was clear. She snipped the last piece and breathed a sigh of relief.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>brrrrring.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>She froze, glancing at the corded phone sitting in the top left corner of her desk, its little red light blinking away. Call on line one.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>brrrrring.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>She lifted it up to her ear, taking a deep breath and preparing to explain how she was finally ready to write up her piece if Mr. Dewey would just come down and see her work so that she could properly explain it, but before she had the chance, she heard a strange voice on the other end that was almost familiar. It was her boss for certain, but his voice sounded wrong, it echoed and warped. She flinched in surprise, pulling the phone back slightly from her ear as he spoke. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Can you prove it yet?” he asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>All of her words died in her throat. Her hand shook as she tried to maintain her grip on the phone and she reluctantly turned her gaze back towards her desk, her eyes widening as she realized it was piled high with more documents once again. She stood there in silence for a moment, the gears in her mind spinning as she tried to process what she knows she must do, keenly aware of the thing on the other end of the line waiting patiently for her response. She slammed the handset down. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hariett sat back down in her chair and looked over the new papers. There was more, so much more. Her fingers ran through her hair and she dug her nails into her scalp, letting out a frustrated sigh. How could she have been so stupid as to think she had been ready to publish? She had to dig deeper, she thought, as she gripped her pen tight and began to furiously take notes once again. She wrote and wrote and wrote until the skin on her fingertips wore down and began to bleed but it didn’t matter. She just kept going, there wasn’t enough time to spare to let the pain slow her down.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was already out of wall space but this was only a mild setback as she quickly hopped up on her chair and began plastering documents to the ceiling until it too was completely covered and she moved to the floor to cover it as well, careful where she stepped so as not to tear anything. She stood on top of her desk, her eyes darting rapidly around the room and drawing connections between the new files and the old ones. She grabbed her string and pinned one end to a contract near the center of the ceiling and then she made her way across the office, letting the string unspool behind her as she went until it had stretched to form a long diagonal that cut through the empty space of room and ended at a small picture pinned to the lower left corner of the north wall. From there she wrapped the string around that pin and kept walking, this time heading to a newspaper clipping in the upper right of the opposite wall, then a bill stuck to the floor, then a tax record in the southeast corner. Pin, to pin, to pin, the room began to fill with those thin red strings until it became nearly impossible for her to maneuver around to keep tying them. She’d managed to make her way very carefully back to her desk where she’d tried to leave a small gap in which to sit cross-legged on its surface, but once there she was trapped unless she wanted to risk pulling any of the strings loose by moving. That was not a chance she could afford to take, so she stayed put, meaning she couldn’t add anything else. But that was alright, she didn’t need anything else. She’d solved it.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>brrrrring.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>The little office was deadly quiet.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>brrrrring.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>She grabbed the phone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Can you prove it yet?” The voice intoned. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She tried to force her tongue to move, to form the simple answer “yes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But it would be a lie. She couldn’t lie when she knew in her heart that there was more to be found, to be explored, to be exposed. She didn’t even bother to hang up the phone, just released it from her grasp and let it land with a thud. Her mind was suddenly flooded with information and she tried to reach down to her drawers to get more paper to write it all down but they were strung shut.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She grew desperate as she scanned the room for somewhere to continue to work out her theories, her evidence, but there was no space. Has this room always been so small? She needed to keep writing but she couldn’t reach anything beyond herself, the strings that surrounded her on all sides felt as if they were closing in and threatened to strangle her. She couldn’t work like this, she needed more space, more space, </span>
  <em>
    <span>more space</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then it clicked. There </span>
  <em>
    <span>was</span>
  </em>
  <span> one space left, and it was so obvious she could have laughed. Luckily her pen was still in reach and she uncapped it. Rolling up her sleeves, she began to scrawl the final pieces to the puzzle onto herself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The words wound their way around her body, starting at her palms and crawling down her forearms, onto her stomach and covering her legs. As she penned the last sentence around her ankle the ink finally ran dry, but she didn’t need it anymore anyway. She began to cry tears of joy. She’d finally done it. It was all here. Now to make the final connections. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She jabbed her last few pushpins into her skin to mark the important points and the string did its work, wrapping around her limbs on its own and at last she was one with her craft. It was complete. She smiled. Mr. Dewey would take her seriously as a real journalist again. They all would.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>brrrrring.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>This was her moment. She couldn’t move her arms to grab the phone, but she remembered she had never actually placed the phone back in its cradle before and she glanced down to see it was still hanging from its cord. It answered itself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A pause.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Can you prove it yet?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, it’s all right h..” she started but trailed off mid-sentence when she caught sight of a new document printed on bright paper stuck to the center of the wall right at her eyeline, its colors seeming to shift the longer she stared at it. She was certain she hadn’t put it there. Had she? She squinted to try to read it and-</span>
</p><p>
  <span>No… no, but that would mean...</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was wrong. All of it was wrong. She looked around the room at all of her research before focusing in again on that final document. She scanned the words once, twice, ten times but she could figure no way in which it didn’t disprove everything she’d worked so hard on. Her whole body began to shake. She’d poured everything she had into this story and it still wasn’t enough. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She. Was. Wrong.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her eyes burned with rage and in one swift movement she pulled herself free from the strings attached to her body, the pushpins ripping from her newly inked skin and leaving behind marks that dripped with blood. She reached her arms up, threading their way through the web of strings and gathered as many of them as she could in her fists, closing her fingers tightly around them. She screamed at the top of her lungs until her throat burned and with all her strength, she pulled.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Everything came crashing down at once as all the pins were yanked free, sending the documents flying out into the room in all directions like a blizzard that threatened to bury her under its weight. The bundles of string now hung limply in her hands. She loosened her grip and let them fall, and she collapsed with them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>---</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eventually she mustered the strength to sit up, surveying the wreckage around her.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>brrrrring.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before pushing herself to her feet and beginning to collect the papers from the ground and reassemble them into files. One by one she put them back into her desk until the floor and walls were once again completely barren.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>brrrrring.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>The phone taunted her with its call to action.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She sat back down at her desk and held her pen tight.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This time she was going to get it right. She had to.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hello again, thank you for reading I hope you liked it! As with last time, if you have any questions about the domain or about my interpretation of the song feel free to ask, and let me know what song you'd want to see next!</p><p>Stream Will Wood!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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